roughly 4.6 billion pieces of content are being created each and every single day in two days you have more content than the world's population most creators are about to get wiped out but there's also a golden opportunity everything's changing faster than we realize ai is disrupting content creation algorithms are fragmenting and the strategies that worked just months ago are becoming obsolete the algorithms have changed in which your follower count doesn't matter as much social media has been democratized it's whatever gets tons of engagement when it first comes out it just shows to everyone and the stuff that doesn't doesn't matter if you have a lot of followers it just dies down really quick but here's the good news smart creators who adapt are about to cash in on the biggest opportunity in years today on the Think Media podcast you're going to discover the newest trends in social media AI and digital marketing so that you don't get left behind i'm sitting down with Neil Patel 1.4 4 million subscribers on YouTube founder of multiple multi-million dollar companies forbes calls him one of the top 10 online marketers wall Street Journal says he's the top web influencer and he was recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur by President Obama in this exclusive conversation you'll get to learn from not just a futurist predicting what's coming but someone who's in the trenches implementing what's working right now you're going to discover the seven social media and AI trends that are reshaping 2025 neil's exact four-step system for viral content that got him 1 million followers across platforms why Google's dominance is ending and why SEO no longer means search engine optimization it means search everywhere optimization this is everything you need to know not just to survive but to absolutely dominate in 2025 let's dive in neil welcome to the Think Media podcast i'm super excited to dive into the content today and recently you did a breakdown of some of the biggest social media and AI trends that entrepreneurs marketers content creators need to know but on a broad level what do you think is kind of the state of online marketing and social media right now the biggest challenges and the biggest opportunities the biggest challenges is there's too much content roughly 4.6 6 billion pieces of content are being created each and every single day in 2 days you have more content than the world's population now when I say content I'm talking about text audio images videos pretty much any type of content that you can imagine not all of it's published to the web but it's being created great example of this is I can bust out my phone right now take a picture of this that is considered someone creating content right because I just took an image technically I didn't but if I did you get the point it would be a piece of content or this recording of this podcast is example of another piece of content so the problem that you face is there's too much content and you got to figure out how to get attention when the algorithms have changed in which your follower count doesn't matter as much social media has been democratized it's whatever gets tons of engagement when it first comes out it just shows to everyone and the stuff that doesn't doesn't matter if you have a lot of followers it just dies down really quick uh the reason there's a big issue with getting your content tons of reach is not that oh I didn't record in good quality or use good lighting or microphone like this setup because if you look at a lot of the stuff that goes viral and does well it doesn't have any of these key characteristics it's typically the stuff that's done well not necessarily gone viral but does well in today's world is stuff that's new forget the word what's high quality content because that's in the eye of the beholder i'm talking about if you look at just in general the stuff that's doing well is new stuff that no one's talked about before and that's the big challenge that we face right now on the web in which it's hard to create stuff on new topics because most things have already been talked about so most things are regurgitated that's a key insight and so how do you spot things that are new personally so the way I spot things are new and they're not perfectly new but they're close enough or starting to trend or they are up and coming and going to be uh popular is we have a tool called answer to the public and we believe search happens everywhere so everyone talks about SEO you know search engine optimization we call SEO search everywhere optimization and when you look at Google Google only makes up around 27% of the market share they get around 13.7 billion searches a day there's over 50 billion searches a day youtube is super popular instagram has 6.5 billion searches a day um Snap has 4 billion a day um you know even the Apple App Store has 500 million a day like Amazon has 3.5 million a day uh chat GBT around a billion a day so when you start looking at all this data what we like doing on answer the public is it shows you what's up and coming because it's using um something similar to Google suggest where showing what people are recently typing in and if you look at these platforms if you type in a keyword like marketing or digital marketing or YouTube marketing it'll show you the longer tale phrases that people are talking about so I love using that tool partly because it's mine just being honest um but I bought it i didn't create it uh and the reason I love using is it'll show me what's up and coming on YouTube Google Tik Tok Instagram uh and the list goes on and on but my favorite one there is Amazon because I can see what's up and coming related to products and let's say if I'm creating products to monetize my YouTube channel I'm not but let's say if I was I can start creating content around stuff that's up and coming on Amazon and I can do the same query on Answer the Public on YouTube to see what's up and coming and if they're different the cool part is is I can start going after the stuff that's up and coming on the other platforms that's not up and coming yet on YouTube or Instagram or any of the other social channels and then create content for each one i know that our community is going to geek out on this because we talk about Answer the Public a lot and uh the fact that's your tool that you invested in and purchased what What is the This speaks to the uh paid features right you get three free searches a day but are you talking about the deeper level of answer the public and of course we'll link up that tool in the show notes no you can you can do most of it for free and I think you get four you get one then you register and I think you get three more so whether it's three or four doesn't really matter you get keywords unlimited none are blocked um you may not got CPC and search data on all of them but that's okay you just go you don't really need the CPC and search data i know those are premium features but like it's up and coming trending stuff the CPC and the search data is not going to be 100% accurate uh and it's not going to be a representation of where that keyword is going or potentially going well uh everyone's going to be more pumped than ever this is a free tool and opportunity you can start using right now to spot trending insights uh upcoming topics so that you can create new stuff because that's what's working on YouTube and social media right now and you recently made a video about trends in general and I've written down seven key social media and AI trends for 2025 and I want you to unpack some of these so that we can stay on the cutting edge as creators and entrepreneurs and number one is platforms now prioritize new creators more than ever can you break that down yeah so people have this misconception like "Oh I'm going to join YouTube but it's too late i don't have any followers." And they don't care if you have a million followers or zero followers what they really care about is did you create some amazing viral piece of content or just amazing piece of content that people love within your vertical or niche again it doesn't have to go viral and is this content that no one else has been talking about on the platform and fills a void or a gap for people searching or looking for uh content around that topic so if you create content that's super high quality and engaging you're much more likely to get views and it doesn't matter if you're a new account or old account or have a lot of followers or little followers because if you have a new account with very little followers or no followers when you publish the content they show it to people and they show it to people who they think would be interested and if those people are interested they like they comment they share it's going to cause them to start showing it to more and more people even if you have no followers um and this is a great example is or a great example of this is if you look at a lot of the viral videos out there uh on YouTube a long long time ago i saw this dude uh I think he had dog in his screen name or username i don't know exactly what his username is i'm not trying to offend him i just I think the word dog was in there um cool dude uh he had like a tattoo of a a feather I think going down his neck i could be off and his car broke down he longboarded to work right is a version of a skateboard it's just a longer skateboard I believe and he was just chucking some cranberry juice in a big bottle what followers did he have to make him get millions and millions of views same with on YouTube i saw this clip of this girl who said "I'm looking for a husband uh in finance 65 blue eyes." Uh I don't know what the other things were but it was catchy and then she even released a video or a music video with it with I believe David Gua or one of those musicians and she started getting tons and tons of views on YouTube and all the other social channels but she didn't really have the follower count to get that many views it was just more so the content was catchy and good i was watching CNBC so I watch a lot of the financial sites and they even referenced that clip of her talking about it and funny enough that's actually how I first learned about it it actually wasn't YouTube i first learned from there and then I went to YouTube to go find it so we're living in an era where you can go viral regardless of following and even if you're just starting from scratch uh I've heard it said one way by I think Gary Vaynerchuk i'm curious your take on this statement i believe we're no longer in the era of social media but we're in the era of interest media do you agree i agree and that's why I said you need to create new content and if people like it and the people who see it that they show it to comment like share it which is crazy not everyone's going to do that but if everyone did that it got shown to 10 people and everyone did it then it got shown to 100 people and they all did those three things not me manipulated not you know fake comments and likes and shares but they genuinely did it they'll start showing it to 10,000 then a million and then it just explodes why because those three things that I just mentioned on YouTube signal that someone's interested and another one that people very rarely discuss is watch time right and I know it's discussed on a lot of different channels but people discuss how you can get more comments or they discuss how you can get more likes or shares but not enough people focus on watch time and if you look at a lot of the tips that try to teach you how to get watch time they try to give you hacks and I'm not saying those hacks aren't somewhat effective those hacks don't compare to just creating something that's new and interesting that people haven't seen before because they're much more likely to fully watch your video if it's new and interesting than if it's something that's regurgitated so the second trend is an expansion of this the new algorithm formula revolution you're kind of just breaking this down how do algorithms work now they show content to a small test group and then it starts to expand help us understand yeah so if you release a piece of video on or if you release a video on YouTube whether it's short or whether it's long they'll show it to a handful of people if those handful of people engage engagement for them on YouTube specifically is someone watching as much of the video as possible hopefully better than the average within that category if they engage through comments liking sharing it's a combination of all those i would say video watch time is the most important um and if they do all of that they start showing it to more people and if your metrics are better than the average video within that category they keep showing it to more and more people and that's how you grow that's really the key because remember the more people that watch your YouTube video the more people that stick around on YouTube even click on other suggested videos after they watch your video these are all signals that shows YouTube oh this video is creating more good users and when YouTube has more stick users what happens to the revenue it climbs because they monetize through ads and subscriptions so viral potential is based on watch time not follower count which brings us to number three video length is everything we're going a little bit deeper platforms care about retention so what is your thought and one of the biggest questions we get is how long should I make my YouTube videos i always tell people quality over quantity and you have to decide what quality is um that's a very vague term in the marketing world because it's really in the eye of the beholder but if your video is only supposed to be five minutes and you can extend it to 10 by just adding tons of fluff and stuff people probably don't care about but it's just filler content you're probably better off having a 5 minute video than a 10-minute video because your watchtime completion rate is going to be way better than if you had a 10-minute video and people only stuck around a minute versus if you had something that was 5 minutes but because there was less fluff people stuck around for 3 minutes instead of one you're going to be better off because 3 minutes is more consumption than 5 minutes I mean than 1 minute um even if the video was half the length but generally speaking from YouTube we see videos around 7 10 minutes 15 minutes do really well um I would say 10 plus minutes is great but it doesn't mean that you have to create a video that's 10 plus minutes focus on what content that you can create that's really new and interesting where people want to continue watching versus focusing on the length of the video hey we're going to get back to the conversation with Neil in just a second but if you're ready to get serious with YouTube and with video podcasting and you want to implement everything that you've been learning today we have a free 1-hour deep dive YouTube strategy class that's available on demand at thinkmasterclass.com during this noofluff training you're going to learn the one strategy that's generating over 150,000 organic views on YouTube every single day on our YouTube channels and the three major components to make it work for you this is the perfect next step to implement everything you're learning today in this episode so to get access to this exclusive one-hour deep dive YouTube strategy masterclass just go to thinkmasterclass.com or click the link in the show notes let's jump back into the episode we've been unpacking some things you've mentioned but the next one is AI powered recommendations are a gamecher is there anything else to expand on that if how AI is driving these algorithms and making viral growth greater yeah well you know it's pretty much self-explanatory like you mentioned the recommendations uh just end up letting people know other similar videos that they can watch but here's a real cool thing youtube for the longest time when you talk even if you don't upload a SRT file it can add it for you and let you know the text that the person's saying it wasn't always 100% accurate but it's good enough with AI not only are they better at understanding you know what words you're saying but they're better at understanding the context of the words and the meaning and what you're really talking about and the topic so allows them to recommend better videos to the consumer which is great because you want to make sure that uh your video is hot so that way it's recommended more and it's shown you're showing other related videos that are good for uh your watchers because that just keeps people on YouTube longer which makes it more likely that your video is going to get views uh and this doesn't have to do so much with the algorithm when it comes to related videos this has more to do with watch time uh hack that people can end up doing is using sub hooks so everyone knows that hey you got to get them in the first 5 seconds well if someone if you have a 10-minute video and you're talking about 10 different sections in that video try to use a hook for each section so then that way those are like little mini sub hooks so that keeps people intrigued so they keep watching the rest this is like you said self-explanatory but if we were to take this strategically deeper how do you go with the approach of developing your content researching your content because what I'm hearing you say is Google and YouTube understand better than ever before what we're saying how we're structuring our content what the meaning is what the context is but that means we're going to need to inject all of those things in our content in a very strategic way so for the busy creator the busy entrepreneur what do you think it takes to put together rich content in video form to win in today's marketplace when you you leverage research on YouTube what I see most creators doing is they'll research topics like I can research a topic like LinkedIn or how to grow on LinkedIn they look to see what was already popular that other people created and then they created similar videos with their own take the problem with that formula is you're pretty much doing a version of something that already did well and you're probably doing a version of something that did well many times so it's kind of now played out so when you create it you may get some views but you're not going to get anywhere near the views in most cases like the original versions what I recommend doing is you research what's hot so for example if I'm in marketing digital marketing which I am and I teach people how to get traffic from Google or uh you know AI platforms or Instagram or YouTube I would start doing research on let's say what's popular with ranking on Google and then see what all the popular videos were same with with ranking on Bing because they're both search engines that most people are familiar with but now everyone's starting to use chat GBT i would then see what type of content is popular for chat GPT i would also see what kind of content is popular for perplexity i would do the same for claude and then I would look for the gaps what are the gaps that people talked about largely when it came to ranking for Google and Bing that people aren't talking about for chat GPT Perplexity or Claude that gives me an avenue to fill this void because if I can do that the chances are people would be interested in that video because Claude Perplexity Chat GPT are all popular uh platforms the key is it has to be relevant to it i can't take something that was related to Google and it wouldn't work on Chad GPT and be like look what you could do on Chad GBT then I'm just creating misinformation but assuming it would work for Chad GBT or is a different spin or a relevant spin or there's similar types of factors that I can leverage or concepts i now have idea for a video on something that was popular for a different channel but there's new channels that people are interested in that aren't talking about that yet they should know about it those type of videos are likely to do very well genius so we're learning the strategies that worked just a few years ago are quickly becoming obsolete and brands and creators that failed to adapt really risk watching their traffic conversions and ROI vanish y some of the other trends that you've identified is that brand recognition trumps traffic volume can you explain what that means yeah so let's go back in time all right search engines and I consider YouTube a search engine because you people search for content on there um or content engine whatever you want to call but a lot of experiences or most online experiences start with a search YouTube and Google have this problem of misinformation and if you go back into time when Google first started there was always misinformation you fast forward to today there's still misinformation when you look at these AI platforms like chat GPT sometimes there's misinformation because what they're doing is they're crawling the and they're taking what's been out there and based on things like links and social shares and comments and engagement they're determining what they should show other people but then they realize you have extreme cases okay and I'm not trying to get political here but I'm going to give everyone a extreme case that they can relate to a few years ago we all had CO 19 that popped up in this world right sadly people passed away from it if you fast forward today it's kind of people don't really talk about it and they're used to life and they just go around their day i don't know how many times you walk around and you see someone with a mask but for me it's very rare you know if I see a hundred people it's very rare that even one out of them has a mask i was just on an airplane from Air France uh or Paris to Los Angeles and when I was standing in line to board the plane I don't think any one person wore a mask the only person I saw with a mask and I could have missed someone was one of the people working for the airlines and they themselves had a mask when they're helping people scan their uh boarding pass but when you look at co they had an introduction of co vaccines and if you ask people what they thought about the vaccines when they first came out most articles were really positive some were negative and some of the negative ones were getting tons and tons of engagement because there were some people that were against it and I'm not asking if you were for or against it or if any viewer was for or against it um that's not the point but you have extreme examples on both points and you know even like Facebook Mark Zuckerberg publicly went out and said he had to censor some data based on government requests related to COVID but if you fast forward today okay again I don't need to know if anyone's taken a vaccine or not but chances are whether you took a vaccine or not in the past you don't take any more booster vaccines or anything like that i don't even need anyone to answer this you can just go look at the earnings of Fizer Madna or any of the stocks out there the data is pretty much public on how much revenue they generate from vaccines uh and the number is really really low compared to a few years ago right their stocks boom from it not anymore the reason I bring up this example is everyone can relate to the COVID vaccine era so how does a user know when they were COVID when they were searching for a video on YouTube or doing research which one is accurate and which one isn't because the people for the vaccine and against the vaccines both had tons of engagement and tons of comments and views and shares and saves and links and all this kind of stuff and tons of watchtime engagement so it's really hard to know which ones the algorithm should show up so one thing they started doing over time is saying "Hey if this video is from WebMD a brand that's well known for health advice or a doctor like a Dr fauci we are more likely to show it because it's a brand or it's recognized and they're less likely not 100% unlikely but less likely in their eyes to push out fake information so these platforms look for brands and they try to push brands first because they know they're less likely to put out fake information a great example of this is CNN if you watch CNN and they post something you would hope because it's a well-known website they're less likely to put out fake information my dad watched a video on CNN uh this was a year plus ago and it said Neil Patel is running for I believe senator you know I'm not a politician and they had my face all over it what's the problem when you Google Neil Patel you want to take a guess you already know this one if you Google Neil Patel what do you think's that biggest issue if you're looking for an image reveal the reveal it to me okay the the biggest issue is going to be I'm going to rank for everything because my background is SEO you agree with that right 100% so you're gonna out So this same name is what you're saying is is running and you're going to outrank that individual because of brand yes not on purpose so CNN showed a video of me running for senator like my image of technically there was a Neil Patel running for senator i don't know if he won or lost but he was in a different state and it wasn't me but yet CNN showcased my image typically that's very rare for CNN to do they didn't fact check it but if they did or the YouTubes of the world the Googles of the world the Facebooks of the world typically assume that the brands usually do fact check and they usually do so they're more likely to showcase their content because they know they're likely to create less fake information than a random person so you got to build a brand over time and showcase your experience your expertise your authority and trust and if you don't have any of that at the beginning that's okay hey by contin publishing content building a community you can build up those signals so this trend is brand recognition trumps traffic volume and this matters in today's fragmented marketing landscape with 59% of Google searches resulting in no clicks brand awareness drives purchasing decisions across 11 touch points give us just one before we go to the next trend final practical application for the small business owner the small creator and even small I mean you might have 10,000 subscribers 50,000 you might have a silver play button from YouTube but sometimes when you think about brand you're not CNN you're not Amazon you know you're not these huge brands so when we are thinking about you mentioned we can start be consistent build a community but what's the action item to leverage this trend as your longtail niche content creator yeah so I'll give you a quick stat then I'll tell you something and then I'll give you the solution so the first stat is roughly one out of every three searches on Google is for a brand most people don't know that um it could be a brand it could be a product that the brand owns and variations of it like price comparison you know like uh Pampers diapers price comparison i'm I'm making up a keyword but that's example of a branded search one out of every three searches keep in mind 13.7 billion searches a day on Google one out of every three are brand which is kind of ridiculous to think about another interesting tidbit when it comes to creating a brand that people don't realize is Google doesn't want to just showcase CNN for everything or Wikipedia or New York Times they actually want to showcase niche brands or verticalbased brands that are authoritative and they know more about that subject than anyone else so if you look at politicians whether it is Donald Trump or Joe Biden or Barack Obama they all have a bigger brand than me would you agree with that statement i agree okay would you agree i know probably more about marketing than most presidential candidates i agree so uh YouTube doesn't want to give you marketing advice from someone who has a brand but isn't known for that category they want creators who specialize and they want them to be known in that category because that information is going to be typically more helpful more accurate and it's going to provide more value which is going to keep them coming back to YouTube more often right like if Joe Biden kept giving everyone YouTube advice do you think your followers would turn to him or would they turn to you they would turn to you because you're known for YouTube and you're great at it right doesn't matter if your brand's not as big as a past president and I'm not trying to pick on Joe Biden i'm just giving you an example of this so when you are out there and you're trying to create a brand keep in mind that the average consumer before they really evangelize a brand become loyal start purchasing telling other people about it it requires roughly 11.1 touch points that's in today's world 2025 if you go back into time a few years ago the average touch point before a purchase was around 8.5 interactions and that could be interactions multiple times on the same platform like YouTube or it could be interactions on multiple platforms so what I would recommend is you create content and you do it consistently that's number one because if you don't it's hard to get the touch points and get people to come back number two repurpose your content and put on multiple platforms doesn't matter if you release similar content on YouTube Instagram Tik Tok they all take similar formats release the content everywhere even if you get less views on the other channels it's okay something is better than nothing ideally create content specific for each platform and the audience but I know that's hard for most people to do because it revolves a lot more time and budget and then the fourth thing that I would tell people is most people focus on creating content and they're like "Okay I created this piece of content and this is great let me go create the next piece of content." Yes you need to create more content but instead of just focusing on quantity promote what you have we spend more time promoting a piece of content that we release than creating the piece of content so what I recommend doing is emailing other people that you know engage with uh content like yours ask them to like it share it i know that may feel awkward at first but hey you know if you don't ask you'll never receive and it really does all help and let people know you'll return the favor for them not just have them like it and comment i'm talking about actually like have them watch it and give feedback right um that helps with engagement numbers and it helps with showcasing it to more people in addition to that you can do strategies like uh tell people on some of your other social networks like through stories like on Instagram hey I just published this new video on YouTube you guys should check it out go swipe up to go watch the video or click the link and doing little things like that will get you more engagement on YouTube which will cause your videos to do much better and a lot of people like showcasing their content everywhere and I think that's great but at the beginning my recommendation is if you're really trying to go uh and try to build your community on YouTube specifically publish it first on YouTube especially the long forms use the other social channels like through stories and things like that to push that YouTube content and then later you can publish the whole video on Instagram and the other social networks so our next trend this is a bold statement podcasting is the underrated traffic channel can you back that up yeah so did you know there's roughly uh seven to eightish billion blogs right now that's roughly one blog for every single person out there um the last podcasting stat that I checked was I think it was around four 4.5 billion podcasts so when you divide that for the amount of people in the world that's a thousand one podcast for every thousand something people there's a big disparity if you look at how many people are consuming podcasts uh just in the United States the list is the number is growing really fast um and when we look at how many new podcast is being created we saw during like co during those times more people are creating podcasts but the number of new public podcasts being created has been declining percentage- wise and uh a lot of the old podcasts aren't active anymore so if you just release a podcast just because there's so much demand it tends to just get viewership without really much promotion um viewership uh audience and if you do video format you can leverage it for YouTube you can leverage it for uh Spotify as well because Spotify you know you can upload video podcasts and you're going to get more views as well and if you look at like Joe Rogan how many people consume his podcast through the video version i know when I listen to the Rogan show I don't listen it through a audio version i listen it through the YouTube version and that also creates branding and brand queries that's one way to get your brand out there because when I'm looking for the latest episode I'll just go into YouTube and just type in Joe Rogan and then I go to the latest episode and then click from there are you ready to start your YouTube channel but you don't know where to begin or have you been posting videos but you're frustrated because you're just not getting the views and nobody is seeing them for a limited time you can get the number one best-selling YouTube strategy book YouTube Secrets for free at ytsecs.com this book is the proven blueprint that has helped thousands of people go from zero subscribers to a thriving channel all I ask is that you pay shipping and then I will mail you the brand new updated second edition of YouTube Secrets and when you place your order today there's a couple other super cool things that I'll hook you up with first you're going to get instant access to a free deep dive master class where I will break down the exact strategy I'm currently using to generate over 120,000 views per day every single day on YouTube and generate over $100,000 per month on the platform as well as the three biggest mistakes that most creators make when starting and trying to grow their channel that class is free to watch instantly when you pick up this special offer now you're also going to get my video series called The Perfect Video Recipe one of the updated chapters in the second edition is titled The Perfect Video Recipe it's actually a formula for how to structure YouTube videos to get maximum views and how to break through in the YouTube algorithm this is the exact formula that readers of the book and our students are using to generate millions of views and again that'll just be included when you jump on this limited offer third you're going to get access to our 1,00 subs club email newsletter which delivers actionable weekly tips to your email inbox that will help you get to 1,000 subscribers fast and we also do really cool weekly giveaways that includes lighting and microphones and YouTube equipment plus software that will help you on your creator journey but here's the thing supplies are limited on this free book promotion so if you want to grab this offer go to ytsecs.com right now and just place your order covering shipping and I'll get this book in the mail to you right away so the opportunity is it billions of podcasts exist or actually fewer than 5 million active podcasts exist no no so there's around 4.5ish million podcasts most of them are not active uh blogs sorry I I think I said there was seven to eight billion blogs did I say that no I'm actually wrong on that i meant to say there's roughly a billion blogs seven to eight billion people so there's one blog for roughly every seven or eight people a podcast there's 4.5ish million podcasts some are active some are not same with the blog some are active some are not but there's one podcast for every thousand something people it's just less competitive got it so I mean yeah that disparity is is insane and so also the podcast medium attracts an affluent audience with the average income of $75,000 or higher yes so you have more loyal listeners this is kind of an interesting more money better customers more serious so not all traffic is the same if you were to think about yes there's short form opportunity yes uh people are in Tik Tok or YouTube shorts but even if you look at the RPM on a YouTube short maybe it's 15 cents if you're if you're doing well on a video podcast in a professional niche the RPM could be $10 $20 it could be even higher speak a little bit to also you know why podcasting could be an underrated traffic channel even if your audience is much smaller and more niche you're building really strong loyalty and it's much easier to drive a conversion from a podcast versus a short if you don't believe me you just gave the stats on uh monetization from a short versus a long form video look at Mr beast he's published some of the data on how much he makes from a short versus a long form video it's night and day different the reason shorts don't monetize well isn't because people don't consume them they're not as engaged they don't typically recall the next day what they consumed and that's why long form videos especially if you're in professional services or in a niche that's lucrative just perform way better from a monetization and traffic standpoint and the reason it builds a lot of traffic is when you look at most podcasts they tend not to be scripted they're just real and people are talking and they're getting to the nitty-gritty and revealing stuff that they may not in a typical day in the life and those episodes do extremely well because people are being vulnerable they're being transparent and people like it it shows the ups the downs of people the good the bad it humanizes them so if someone's listening to this and they're wanting to get into this opportunity YouTube podcasting social media and number one maybe they've actually tried and failed so far they've had mediocre results and maybe they're still trying to figure out their angle their niche what exactly their approach is going to be but also maybe they actually have not chosen their strategy yet and they're trying to think about what's my content format going to be how am I going to approach this what would be your advice for the first few decisions for dialing in a content strategy and then specifically the first few steps for basically deciding if if podcasting is right for you and then getting started in light of still feeling like okay only 4.5 million active podcast exists i see the opportunity but competition still feels fierce how am I going to stand out everyone's interviewing the same on same guest quote unquote how could I figure out my unique angle what is your advice you don't have to figure out a unique angle that's a beautiful part about podcasting i don't care what niche you're in it is not competitive there really isn't that many active podcasts especially if you look at how many people are have produced 50 plus episodes there's not that many that survive not because you can't get views it's just people give up and they're not consistent it requires some work if you just go and create it you don't have to have a unique angle you can interview some of the same guests what makes podcasting unique isn't the guests it's what you're asking the individual um just like you and me we're doing an interview right now i've done hundreds if not thousands of interviews probably a thousand plus interviews over the last 24 years right i don't have the exact number but it's a lot some weeks sometimes some weeks some days I'm doing two or three of this right like it really adds up but on an average week because I travel I probably say I do four or five interviews a week some of them do really well because I'm talking about new stuff that I've never shared before and when you're a podcast interviewer the key is listening to the person that you're having as a guest what have they talked about on past podcast interviews they've done and then figure out what they haven't talked about because it's just eliminate and you start talking about those kind of things and you come up with questions that you think would be intriguing that you think that they could talk about you may send them to them in advance um what I like doing is I like reaching out to a few of their friends so you ask the podcast interview that you're having and you say "Hey can you mind do you mind in uh introducing me to like two or three of your close friends i would love to ask them some questions so we make the podcast better." They almost always say yes and you ask them "Hey what are you five or 10 things uh that you think I should interview Neil about that he's never talked about before?" And that can help you get really interesting insights without doing tons of work it's genius um and if you're gonna start a podcast from scratch um or a YouTube channel for the professional that's busy what do you think about team uh resources setup amount of hours to allocate per week um we both recently were speaking at an event in Miami for YPO the Global Marketing Summit and uh ahead of time Eric Sue I asked he said that u I said "How much are you spending a month to produce content?" And I think he told me $25,000 is what he's investing in his content and then I said "How much is Neil spending?" And he said "Uh more than that maybe 60 or 70." Uh and I'm curious you know for someone listening to this they've got a growing business they've got revenue but they're not ready to spend 70 grand a month speak to like the workflow maybe the team minimum viable uh product to get your media company internally at your company off the ground and maybe some steps to that with what you're doing but what you might recommend to somebody that's starting so when Eric and I record a podcast we tend to record in the same room that I'm in right now and we pay a gentleman named Noah who's amazing he helps set it up do the lighting and all this kind of stuff for Eric and I um I have my own crew for my own uh stuff but when we do our podcast together we've known we've been using him for ages he used to be one of Eric's uh ex employees and then went on his own and he was there also at the YPO event so when we were at the YPO event Eric and I filmed a marketing school podcast episode in his room we literally took just some camera and some portable mics it came in this rectangle case i don't know what it was called and you just take two out and you just clip them i think you know what it's called but I have no idea they're wireless might be like the road wireless go or the DJI mic dji DJI there you go it was something like the DJI and we plugged it on we didn't script and we just talked about our experiences for an hour and a half because we're too busy and we didn't have time and we were just real and authentic we got more views from that podcast episode with less quality editing or any of that and we were just sitting on a couch it wasn't set up professionally with lighting sound video or anything like that and it just got more views people assume that you need to spend money to create content that is so false you can just bust out your iPhone and just start recording and you can have your first podcast episode literally you can just do that or you can bust out your laptop set up an interview on one of these channels using like Streamyard uh or Reream or any of any of them of of any one of them and just start recording with someone else and you got your content okay so the the barrier to entry is super low and to to think it's going to be about the money or the resources no it's not about your resources it's about your resourcefulness when starting why then do you spend 50 60 $70,000 a month on content and what's the trajectory to scale for somebody doing what you're doing so if that's mid to advanced level break that down for our advanced listeners keep in mind I have a organization with call it a thousand plus people i don't know how many countries we're in 28 countries i don't know how many different languages so when I produce content I got to produce it for our global operations and for a lot of different customers that don't necessarily speak English because we're dealing with large corporations and when you work with large brands not everyone working at these corporations in marketing speak English as their native language so when they're using YouTube and they're searching they typically are searching in their language versus English now a lot of people in the business world do speak English but when they're looking for content consuming it English isn't the first language uh that they're going after so what we do is we create content for a lot of languages and that's expensive ai tools like Hey Genen have started to help reduce costs um and we're also an agency and a lot of our clients are global 10,000 companies they're publicly traded they have massive global operations and they want the nice quality lighting just like right now so it's one of the reasons that we do it because it aligns with our customers and what they're looking for but no joke most of the content that my team here have filmed that's lower quality tends to get more views than the stuff that is highly produced and edited powerful insight so a lot of the budget that's expanded is speaking to the scale of the business that you run the agency the global reach translations AI is giving some new opportunities but for someone to start a show start a YouTube channel that barrier that it's an excuse gear uh expense cost you're saying that's an excuse really what you want to be focusing on is starting and being consistent and especially if I heard you correctly the the big opportunity is most will quit most will give up most podcasts never reach 50 episodes right correct okay final trend social commerce is the new front door what do you think macro we should be paying attention to as this trend but also such things as Tik Tok shop Instagram shop and YouTube shopping as really for the creator an affiliate marketing opportunity that's native to the platform that clickable product links can show up on shorts and long form videos what's happening with this trend and what should we be thinking about strategically yes so I believe the number that I last saw was I think seven trillion or eight trillion will be spent on social commerce a year by 2030 that's a crazy large number the question is is how can you get a small fraction of a slice right if you do that you're making money hand over fist um and what you want to do is focus creating content within a specific vertical and then start monetizing you can monetize by white labeling doing affiliate stuff making it easy for people to just sell products right then and there um you can be an ambassador not an influencer influencer is one thing but how can you be joint with the company um and create a product that can also be partly yours and sell it you look at um Haley Bieber she just sold her makeup company I believe for like a billion-ish dollars to I think it was like some elf beauty i think that's what they were called uh she had a few partners i don't know if they had investors i think some of it quite a bit of it was in stock compensation instead of just cash uh large chunk of their overall shares and when you look at that company what did she have she had partners who understand the industry but she herself had the brand the expertise she was using her platform to start selling you can find other people who are wellknown partner with them and do some of the operations or build your brand and then push out products on these places what we've been seeing that's really effective right now is partnering up with other influencers giving them a percentage of all sales and have them be part of the product um in an affiliate way and that grows your channel your brand helps with sales but what's really interesting with shopping is you're going to see more people eventually go live on these platforms and sell live kind of like QVC uh we see that in Asia that I bet you is going to start booming in the US within the next few years and for those that are following along but when they hear this idea of social commerce and they say like what exactly do you mean or social shopping can you define it at a a basic level for what that even is i'm on Instagram loading up the app i'm casually browsing going through reels all of a sudden it stops my flow and someone shows me a product could be an ad could be organic click a button buy it right then and there don't even leave Instagram and then boom they generated a sale and it's all done and they have autofills and all that kind of stuff just makes it super easy to buy because most people look at marketing as let me create a video promoting a product then send you to a landing page then get you to read everything and then buy why can't you just do it all in one video and do it right then and there so someone doesn't have to leave the platform so you have less of a drop off rate typically we see higher conversions so this is a major shift because it's replacing traditional search that social platforms are the primary product discovery mechanism i actually was at my friend David's house in Vegas and um I'm in his living room i'm like "That's a nice carpet." And he goes "I got it off Tik Tok shop." And I was like "What?" Personally I have I haven't converted that way yet and I was like "You bought like an area rug off of Tik Tok." That was He's like "Yeah." You know and and I would imagine that product came to him algorithmic came to him caught his attention now it's a p purchase lower friction what do you predict is going to happen over the next few years with this how significant is it i think it's going to be one of the biggest commerce channels out there and Amazon and everyone is trying to do partnerships and get their hands on it product discovery is huge we watch all this short form content on all these channels like YouTube it's hard to monetize look at the ad revenue it's just terrible the ad revenue is not terrible because these networks don't want to pay you money they'll gladly pay you more if they can make more they're just not making that much off of short form content what they're finding is it's easier to sell people products than it is to get them to click on a ad through social discovery as we land the plane um a couple topics search YouTube and AI with some of your final thoughts the first would be search you have writed a lot of articles about um what it takes to rank what it takes to rank on Google um you're an expert at this do you think anything has changed on what does it take to rank on YouTube in 2025 i don't think much has changed i think the big thing that people tend to forget is we see people rank better when they keep their profile on YouTube specific to a vertical versus talking about everything so I talk about marketing videos but sometime my team's like let's go broad and let's test this out it may get more views like you know how entrepreneurs are making millions of dollars through chat GBT it's not the right audience and those kind of videos may get views but my channel ranks better when I specifically focus just on marketing videos um and then as far as YouTube goes what's your mindset right now or maybe you know a tactic or strategy right now you're saying okay YouTube's competitive um I'm I want to focus on you covered earlier new you're using answer the public to spot some topics but like what's your thoughts on your personal investment of time money and energy in YouTube how you're thinking about YouTube and where you see YouTube going so I'm just shifting up my YouTube strategy so we used to pay this company I don't know where they were based um I think LA and they would take my outline and then turn it into a script and then I would go record YouTube videos and they would spend a lot of time and money editing um it was on a lot of topics that I wasn't more so keen to record videos on so then stopped working with them i'm now shifting my YouTube strategy to continually produce content there'll be a little bit of a gap though and my buddy AJ is helping me film and edit content that won't be as highly produced but it'll be on topics that I care about it's scripted more real and authentic um because what we've seen is typically when we do too much editing and too much polishing it doesn't do as well as just when it's just more real raw and authentic and that's our goal so we'll talk about more topics related to marketing the vertical that we're in more advanced stuff that would be more related to enterprise customers which is ideally what we're going for we work with SMB and mid-market as well we service the whole funnel um and then we just go from there and then AI obviously massive do you think the average person is underrating AI right now i think they're overestimating AI right now i think people overestimate what it can do right now because people look at as a magic wand in marketing that can solve all their problems it can't go have it optimize your pay-per-click campaigns or uh AB test uh tons of images for you you're going to also get a lot of losses in there losses cost you money right when you're running AB tests but at the same time I I think people underestimate what AI can do for them in the future it's going to do a lot more for them than they can imagine from cleaning your house to getting your groceries like it'll do a lot of things it can probably end up eventually detecting what you're opening a handlebar for on your fridge or you're opening a handlebar who the person is based on your fingerprints see patterns on what you eat and provide that data to insurance companies so they can and medical companies figure out how to make you more healthy and how much your coverage should cost for things like life insurance um so I think AI will do way more for people than uh they're imagining in the future but in the short run people believe it can do everything and it's not there yet it doesn't mean the strategy is not great it's just they're overestimating it in the short run underestimating it in the long run and recently there's been some leaked CEO emails as you know about AI AI agents what is your take on there was a memo from the CEO of Shopify there was a leaked memo from the CEO of Fiverr um there was another CEO that talked was going to give a $20,000 prize to his team's AI agent competition what is your take on what the average what what business owners leaders CEOs should be thinking in light of some of the headlines about job layoffs AI replacing people these types of things i think people should shift their thought process to AI to H AI humans combined with AI how can you make your team more efficient and better at what they do and allow them to focus on the stuff that really moves the needle versus boring repetitive tasks that provide little to no ROI for a company but yet they know they have to do those tasks i think a combination of both is really where the world is going and final question and I want to hear a shout out to your stuff what would you recommend for somebody that wants to train their team personally get educated um to stay on the cutting edge and to figure out how to do exactly what you said with so much information it feels overwhelming how do you figure out this AI stuff it is really overwhelming there's always a new tool you don't need to hop on the latest tool uh if it gets traction then go leverage it but at that time you'll know just be an early adopter but you don't need to be the first adopter what I recommend doing is either do this with your team or external team and every Friday have a call for 10 15 minutes with a group of three or four people within your industry or within your own company and talk about a cool thing that you did with AI and showcase it to people doesn't have to be a presentation and you can just share your screen but if everyone starts doing that you'll start learning cool ways people within your space or your department are using AI and it'll give you ideas on how you can be better and use it within your daily basis to actually move the needle when it comes to your KPIs like your key performance indicators versus just using it because we see a trend of everyone using these AI technology but it has nothing to do with their traffic sales revenue or cost savings or any of that they're just a lot of them are even spending more time using AI and becoming more inefficient when it comes to driving results for our organization genius advice and so much powerful actionable insight today neil Patel you are doing very cool things we'll link it up in the show notes but where can we uh listeners check you out learn more from you and where would you like to uh shout out your stuff my social handles are all Neil Patel and my ad agency is NP Digital well I hope you've been getting value out of this conversation and I want to leave you with my two top takeaways that will change your business and your YouTube channel from this episode but a couple things if you got value today can you like rate share review wherever you watch or listen to the Think Media podcast and if you are ready to get serious about growing your personal brand and business with YouTube if you're thinking about launching or growing a video podcast then check out our free deep dive YouTube strategy training at thinkmasterclass.com it's a one-hour ondemand training where you're going to learn the exact strategy we use at Think Media to generate over 150,000 organic views on YouTube every single day and the three components of that strategy so that you can implement them right now so that'll be linked up in the show notes and you can check out that class for me the top takeaways that will change your business from this episode was that new content wins everything with 4.6 billion pieces of content created daily stop copying what's already been done and check out the answer the public tool which you can use for free for three searches a day to use Neil's gap strategy so that you can turn those ideas into fresh content and number two your follower count is dead of course we still want to get subscribers get gold play buttons silver play buttons but how cool is it that we're living in an era where content is the variable where really social media has turned into interest media and so if you can create good content and strategic content you could go viral regardless of following you could get views regardless of subscriber count it's not that it's easy the landscape is tough competition is high but as you master the strategy content creation storytelling learning these details and actually create content that people watch and watch for a significant amount of time then you can grow right now today and break through and so subscribe to the Think Media podcast for more tips because this podcast is all about helping you build a profitable YouTube channel and learn what are the best practices and what's working today with video content for building your online brand and online business thanks again for being a part of the show my name is Sean Kel your guide to building a profitable YouTube channel